An efficient rectilinear Steiner minimum tree algorithm based on ant colony optimization

The rectilinear Steiner minimum tree (RSMT) problem is one of the fundamental problems in physical design, especially in routing, which is known to be NP-complete. This paper presents a practical heuristic for RSMT construction based on ant colony optimization (ACO). This algorithm has been implemented on a Sun workstation with Unix operating system and the results have been compared with the GeoSteiner 3.1 and a recent work using batched greedy triple construction (BGTC). Experimental results show that our algorithm, named ACO-Steiner, can get a very short run time and keep the high performance.